Without limiting the scope of the invention, its background is described in connection with current methods of forming electrical connections to high-dielectric-constant materials, as an example.
The increasing density of integrated circuits (e.g. DRAMs) is increasing the need for materials with high-dielectric-constants to be used in electrical devices such as capacitors. Generally, capacitance is directly related to the surface area of the electrode in contact with the capacitor dielectric, but is not significantly affected by the electrode volume. The current method generally utilized to achieve higher capacitance per unit area is to increase the surface area unit area by increasing the topography, such as in trench and stack capacitors using SiO.sub.2 or SiO.sub.2 /Si.sub.3 N.sub.4 as the dielectric. This approach becomes very difficult in terms of manufacturability for devices such as the 256 Mbit and 1 Gbit DRAMs.
An alternative approach is to use a high permittivity dielectric material. Many perovskite, ferroelectric, or high-dielectric-constant (hereafter abbreviated HDC) materials such as (Ba,Sr)TiO.sub.3 (BST) usually have much larger capacitance densities than standard SiO.sub.2 --Si.sub.3 N.sub.4 --SiO.sub.2 capacitors. Various metals and metallic compounds, and typically noble metals such as Pt and conductive oxides such as RuO.sub.2, have been proposed as the electrodes for these HDC materials. To be useful in electronic devices, however, reliable electrical connections should generally be constructed which do not diminish the beneficial properties of these high-dielectric-constant materials.